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Astrophotography Birding

January in the Sonoran Desert

Hard to believe it is already January and it sure feels like it. By Sonoran Desert standards, it has been cold. Temperature dropped well into the 20’s two nights in a row. To make matters worse for me, this is the period when I should be doing astrophotography, but it has been cloudy every night until just a few nights ago. Now I only have a couple more nights before the moon starts getting too bright. I hope next month is better! The Ajo Christmas Bird Count was yesterday and joined in on that. Otherwise, not much has been going on.

Here’s my annual Black-throated Sparrow photo.
Another Green-tailed Towhee.
Costa’s Hummingbird at the Cabeza Prieta NWR headquarters, someone has put out a hummingbird feeder there.
NGC 1300, a galaxy about 61 million light years away in the constellation Eridanus. I took a lot of exposure and added it to what I had from last year.
The Medusa Nebula. I have never tried this one before. It was once thought to be a supernova remnant, but recent research proved it to be a planetary nebula. It is a very faint nebula located in the constellation Gemini. This is about 5 hours of exposure with the C8.

4 replies on “January in the Sonoran Desert”

Maybe this is a dumb question, but how does that work to stack images on exposures from last year? Wouldn’t some things in the new images have moved a bit?

The scale and distance is far too vast for any movement to be noticeable. Things that are closer, like planets, will move, but things like stars making up constellations appear to be stationary. They aren’t but they appear to be. Galaxies at millions of light years away just don’t change, from our point of view.

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